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Social Bookmarking not so Delicious anymore

I remember the scramble to work out what to do when the rumours flew around about the demise of Delicious as a social bookmarking tool. Now the new Delicious has launched and the fallout for me is huge – I have to get re-organised all over again!

Even before it was clear what the future of Delicious would be, people were turning elsewhere for alternatives, moving their data to sites Diigo, for example, or to Pinboard.

That was me – I managed to get paranoid about my bookmarks. Actually, I started actively bookmarking in Diigo, which I synchronised with Delicious, which I synchronised with Pinboard. So here we are now – we’re starting all over again as my sync-chain is broken.

I like Diigo for it’s group functions, and maybe this is what the new stacks at Delicious are all about – information curation for groups with visual tweeks. But stacks are not collaborative ventures as represented by groups in Diigo. So I will keep using Diigo for the group collaboration (I like the weekly digest, and the ease of sharing on the fly), as well as for the personal bookmarking across my many devices. .

Richard Byrne takes a look at Stacks and explains that Delicious Stacks could be a good visual way for students to explore a set of links that you have shared with them about a topic or you or your students could create multimedia playlists about a topic to share with each other. If you are new to social bookmarking, this is certainly something you might be interested in.

As I jumped back to Delicious I discovered just how many people forgot to or chose not to accept the changes to the new service. Suddenly I am only following 20 people and I can’t now see who follows me incase I want to reciprocate!!

I follow 101 on Diigo, including some that I consider critical, such as Howard Rheingold and his crap-detection. Now so many of the links I had in papers and presentations that pointed to Delicious users and resources have essentially died.

In the new Delicious:

I detest not being able to change the number of items I view on a page.

the new browser tagging toolbar does not ‘call up’ your existing tags.

there are no longer RSS feeds

no tag cloud and other features are missing

The best social bookmarking site is officially dead!

The new Delicious has a nicer interface, and is clearly going to go in new directions and respond to new needs. However, right now it has things I don’t need and things that are missing, so it’s not my tool of choice as it does not work as efficiently as the old Delicious. But I have my account, so I will continue to ‘watch this space’ – at least I don’t have to start from the beginning. (Perhaps this is just what some people wanted to do to de-clutter?)

12 thoughts on “Social Bookmarking not so Delicious anymore”

Switched to Diigo over a year, and have been happy ever since. Exported all my delicious bookmarks on four accounts when I heard about the troubles last year. Have not returned to delicious since, and have no regrets.

Couldn’t agree more. Basically compromised quite a few years of work and Delicious evangelism for what? It’s a cliche (truism) but a victory for design over substance, aimed at, well, you only have view the front page to see whom. Just becoming a sad old librarian I guess…

For those who have been around social bookmarking long enough, you may remember the debacle of Magnolia – a really good open source bookmarking service – until the servers crashed and everyone’s bookmarks got lost (i.e. no backup). I learnt my lesson from that to (a) ensure I kept my own backup, and (b) never to rely on a single service. I’ve taken a ‘boot and braces’ approach ever since, and now use Delicious, Diigo and Evernote (the latter more for editing notes on bookmarked pages). I’m quite disappointed with what I’ve seen so far on the new Delicious service, but will give it a couple of weeks to see how it shapes up. If I’m not happy, I’ll use Diigo as my primary bookmarking service, but I’m also looking for a service that ties in names I give my bookmarks with globally-recognised concepts, and am just experimenting with Faviki (http://www.faviki.com/) which suggests tag names pulled from Wikipedia. The only problem with this new service is that it doesn’t support tag imports, but I’m hoping this will be provided in the near future. Might be worth a look for anyone who is prepared to start afresh with their bookmarks.

There are some tweets that suggest that perhaps some of the ‘connections’ will turn up, but that doesn’t help with the other features. As to backing up – I wonder how many people simply didn’t because they are not very connected, just used the service?

I am one of those who stuck with Delicious and agree with all your comments. You can find my site at http://www.delicious.com/nextgenlearning – lots of changes but the stacks concept looks interesting. We are still at the horseless carriages stage methinks – still a long way to go before we see a dominant design in social bookmarking (curation) spaces but the journey of innovation is certainly an interesting one. We live in exciting times!